Communication devices and specifically portable communication devices such as cellular handsets or devices are known. Battery life for these devices is an important attribute since that is a major contributor to user satisfaction and convenience. Shorter battery life means that a battery will need to be recharged more often and that the likelihood of service failure due to insufficient battery charge will increase for a given user. Larger batteries could be used, but that would have a detrimental impact on device size, weight, and cost.
Typically, battery life is determined by power consumption of the device when it is in a standby condition, i.e., simply waiting to perform some communication function, since that is what the majority of communication devices are doing for most of the time. Wide area system architects are familiar with this issue and normally design access protocols and the like so that devices associated with the network can spend much of their time in a sleep mode whereby power consumption is minimized by powering down much of the circuitry of the device.
However, the functionality of communication devices continues to increase. For example, users are now demanding and purveyors of devices are thus including multiple receivers in these devices where these receivers are operable on independent services and networks. Multiple receivers that may be concurrently operable often result in an adverse impact on battery life